Commentary on Political Economy

Sunday, 9 September 2018

Descartes's World, Part 3

The Cartesian insistence on the power of logico-mathematical
deduction and intuition as the cardinal methodical tools for the asseveration
of Truth meet an insurmountable obstacle in their own formalism. The “truth” of logico-mathematics has no substantive content: it is “true” by
definition – quod erat demonstrandum
(as was to be demonstrated) – in that the conclusion (the demonstrandum) is already
contained (erat, “was”!) in the
premises (the demonstrans) and, worse
still, the premises already contain the conclusion! But if the premises and the conclusion are so formally related that
they are tautological, then no practical conclusion – no “demonstration”! - can
ever be extracted from such formal reasoning! Only if the logico-mathematical
calculation is “false”, in the sense that it is purely practico-conventional
because it involves heterogeneous elements and therefore has substantive
content, - only in that case can logico-mathematics be “useful”, not “true”, in
a strictly conventional sense!

Here, Descartes’s reliance on the intellect
or Reason as the foundation of human knowledge quite simply falls apart.
Specifically, the twin foundations of the intellect – intuition and deduction –
prove to be categorically antinomic because intuition has a substantive
immanent materialist basis, whereas deduction is entirely formal and
tautological. A life-world in which any reality could be deduced logico-mathematically from intuited premises simply begs the question of how this “original
intuition” (the phrase is Leibniz’s, see the 24 Metaphysical Theses, discussed in M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,
and his dissection in the dimension of philosophical anthropology [Husserl’s
plaint against Heidegger] of the Kantian intuitus
in the Kantbuch) came about in the
first place – of what its substantive content
is. Similarly with cause and effect. If indeed the effect is in the cause and
the cause is in the effect, then it is simply meaningless to connect the two
separate events – cause and effect – in terms of causation because they are not
in fact “separate” events! Far from being “laws of nature or of physics”,
scientific findings are “conventions” in the sense that (a) they are based on
induction, and, (b) they reflect a specific human practical orientation rather
than any “universal laws”. Indeed, mathematical calculations and logical
deductions – not to mention scientific “laws” based on causation –can be valid only ifall their categories are formally equal. But this formal equality necessarily
requires the substantive equality of the elements that these categories
represent! Yet, this is logically impossible, given that substantive
elements are categorically different (different toto caelo, toto genere) from
the logico-mathematical categories that supposedly “stand for” them! This is
the paradox: logico-mathematical categories cannot be “deductive” but merely practico-conventional or empirico-inductive
because deductions must be based
ultimately on intuition - and it is
quite simply impossible to identify and isolate formally the “intuition” that is supposedly “behind” these entities,
because intuition is a substantive, not a formal, entity! Given that the
“truth” of logico-mathematical deductions is entirely formal, its demonstration
must be based on a substantive content – it must be “shown” to be true. But
such a “showing” (Latin, de-monstrare,
to show) is necessarily a practical, physical, substantive and material task
that contradicts the supposed “formality” and “logico-mathematical necessity”
of every “deduction”!

Hume’s skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature effectively
demolishes Descartes’s analytic a priori
precisely by dissecting every causal relation in terms of individual “images”
that – as “images” – cannot have any con-nection in a pictographic sense or
indeed in any other sense! It was in a colossal effort to rescue Reason from
this nihilistic assault that Kant enucleated his critical idealism and
synthetic a priori as an Ubergang to bridge its antinomic
opposition to Nature. The Kantian attempt to define and refine the “aesthetic”
basis of Pure Reason through the Schematismus
fails miserably once the inescapably “conventional foundation” of every
intuition and every “truth”, of every mathematical identity and every “law of
nature” is laid bare. There is no “synthesis”, let alone any “a priori”,
linking events in the universe! The “legality” of Kant’s theorization of Pure
Reason is precisely what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will be first to attack,
and quite validly so.

Just like
the Self or the Ego, the idea of God must take the mental form of some
particular thought, of which actual physical ec-sistence (physical embodiment)
cannot be predicated. For the Ego in the cogito,
for the human intellect, the perception
of the world is necessarily “false” because no sensual perception can ever
match the formal “purity” of logico-mathematical deduction. In that case, it is
not merely that the human senses err in their estimation of the world: it is
rather that the intellect itself will never be able to comprehend the world,
given that the world is inevitably made up of “appearances”! According to
Descartes, the intellect’s comprehension of the world is imperfect and prone to
error not because of any intrinsic flaws in the intellect – which shares its
status as “substance” with the divine -, but because it is deluded by the will
– which is the “mortal” facet of the intellect - into trusting the lure of “mere
appearances” (Kant’s “bloss Erscheinungen”).
But if the intellect’s “perception” of the world is false, for whatever reason,
then for Descartes, vis-à-vis the intellect, the world has really and truly
become a “fable”: what is more, a fable that, in his requirement of logico-mathematical
determinism of the world – the vera
mathesis – can also be nothing more than a lifeless, soul-less mechanism!
(Again, see Nietzsche’s savage parody of Descartes’s reduction of the world to
“a machine” in The Anti-Christ, par.14). Given that Descartes’s ontological proof
is incapable of bridging the hiatus
irrationalis (Fichte) between Subject and Object, between Reason and
Nature, his rationalism, his “method” cannot but amount to a dogmatic moral imperative,
an early version of the Kantian categorical imperative, the dictamen of the divine affinity of the
intellect. Whence Nietzsche’s riposte in Twilight
of the Idols, “Taken from the moral
viewpoint, the world is false!”Not
indeed because for Nietzsche the world is “false” (pace M. Cacciari in Krisis,
ch. 2) – because that would entail the existence of a universal “truth” against
which the world was “false” – but precisely because for Nietzsche no “universal
truth” is even meaningful, let alone possible! (In this regard, the link
established by Cacciari, loc. cit., between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein is quite
valid and fertile: for Wittgenstein, the world cannot be com-prehended by
language: the world can only be “shown”, but not by language – cf. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

But, leaving all this to one side, how can
the human mind interact with the universe, then? More saliently, if science and
technology are purely a means of knowing a strictly deterministic universe, of finding
a unique “universal key” to the interpretation of “the great book of nature”, (a)
how can humans then be aware of acquiring this “knowledge” given that any such knowledge
would amount to a mechanical operari
necessarily deprived of any “awareness” or “consciousness”? (This is a paradox
that Spinoza tackled as well, unsuccessfully.) And, (b), how can humans interact
with the world without transforming it? Furthermore, even assuming that such
interaction with and trans-formation of the world by humans is possible and
real, how can it be said to emanate causally
from the world itself and, worse still, how can such trans-formation of the
world by humans exclude any negative outcomes or degradation of nature and the
world? The optimistic bias and aporetic nature of Cartesian rationalism is all
here – specifically, Descartes’s well-nigh total neglect of any negative outcomes from scientific
discovery or research is a sign of the bourgeois
mission “to recover and discover” the world toward its own vision of
perfection (per-ficere, to render
flawless through work) – toward its own Utopia. Hence, the positive charge of
Cartesian rationalism goes beyond a mere inert “mechanicism” – robotic,
conflictual, and pessimistic, like Hobbes’s – in favour of a more Baconian eudaemonic slant. In the event, even as
he sought to evade it, mechanicism was Descartes’s only way out of his helpless
idealism: he remained so close to mechanicism
– especially Hobbes’s in physics and politics (cf. C. Schmitt’s “The State as
Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes”, Appendix to Der Leviathan) – that whenever he sought to elucidate his “method”
or “rules” he invariably resorted to the industrial artisanal reality around
him.

Because of the impossibility of reconciling
the (idealistic logico-mathematical) intellect with the (material scientific)
world, Descartes was forced to point to a (scientific?) “method” that is purely
“deductive” and therefore tautological! In attempting to reconcile the
universal mathesis and its absolute determinism with the drive to reconstruct
the truth and the world to a humanized environment, to an earthly paradise,
Descartes is forced to resort to human “skills” in which he sees a “method”
(non-existent in reality) that is literally pro-ductive and mechanical at one
and the same time.

Our method…resembles the procedures in the
mechanical crafts, which have no need of methods other than their own, and which
supply their own instructions for making their own tools. If, for example,
someone wanted to practise one of these crafts…but did not possess any of the
tools, he would be forced at first to use a hard stone…as an anvil, to make a
rock do as a hammer, to make a pair of tongs out of wood…Thus equipped, he
would not immediately attempt to forge swords, helmets, or other iron
implements for others to use; rather, he would first of all make hammers, an
anvil, tongs and other tools for his own use (Rules).

In
reality, what Descartes has done is to reduce his purported “scientific method”
to the mere instinctive human practical – immanentist – invention of means to
satisfy their needs! By conceding that his method “resembles the procedures in the mechanical crafts” (“mechanical”,
not intellectual, crafts!), Descartes ends up proving the exact opposite of
what he intended – that is to say, precisely that there is “no need of methods other than” the practices that humans end up
adopting instinctively to satisfy their physio-logical
(physical andmental) needs! But here it is no longer the mathesis universalis that determines
work; rather, it is work that subsumes the mathesis,
the physics, the science, the technology, to itself in order to satisfy
existing human needs and to pro-duce new ones (cf. Negri, op.cit., p.299).

It is not
“science” that dictates our technical productive activity, but rather it is our
technical productive activity that we rationalize and institutionalise as
“science”. The very fact that Descartes
resorts to manufacturing skills to exemplify the substance of his “method”
evinces, first, the inability to distill such a method from human technical
activity, and, second, the impossibility of splitting human activity into the
“scientific-theoretical” and the “technological-practical”! In reality, all
human productive activity is technical-practical. Homo faber and homo sapiens are
identical entities. Descartes intuits but does not see that his “rules” and
“method” merely mimic the practical activity of homo faber – that, in other words, science is merely the
abstraction of technological activity – or, put succinctly, that homo faber and homo sapiens form an indivisible whole.

Descartes
could never bridge the gnawing gap that his rational idealism opened between
the two antinomic approaches to the lifeworld; consequently, he cannot explain
the world except as a mechanism because his logico-mathematical deductive
reasoning is simply and wholly inapplicable to the empirico-inductive
productive manufacturing practices humans adopt in reality – and in vastly growing
numbers in his own time as capitalist manufacturing industry supplants the old
and moribund feudal mode of production and its theocratic societies. Regardless,
he could not ignore completely the epochal changes occurring all around him in
his theoretical epistemological framework. Descartes himself highlights this
“turn” in the Discourse on Method
where his insistence on the bon sens (good
sense or common sense) goes hand in hand with the adoption of French as the
discursive language freed from the logico-deductive strictures and metaphysical
and theologicalprejudices embedded in
the Latin language – clearly heralding his adherence to the growing revulsion
at the segregation of the logico-deductive reasoning of the Latin-speaking
learned strata in favour of the empirico-inductive productive practices of
artisans.

To
summarise, then, the antinomies of Cartesian rational idealism encapsulate, on
one side, the inability of the earliest bourgeois philosophical reflection to comprehend
the profound transformation of European society from a theocratic absolutist
feudal order to that of a rapidly expanding capitalist marketplace society
founded on formally free labour and manufacturing industry; and, on the other
side of this antinomic thought, they provide the theoretical impetus for a revaluation
of technical-scientific and empirio-inductive industrial labour as against the millenary dominance of dogmatic Scholastic logico-mathematical
deductive thought. The socio-political
and economic significance of this “great transformation” (to borrow a phrase
used in a different historical context by Karl Polanyi) is lucidly
recapitulated by Paolo Rossi here:

Also
within the ambit of philosophy there arose a valorization of the arts and crafts vastly different from
the traditional: some of the procedures utilized by technicians and artisans to
transform nature help in the understanding of natural reality….To introduce tools and instruments in
science, to conceive them as a source of truth, was not an easy task. Truth, in the science of our time, refers,
almost exclusively, to the interpretation
of signs generated by instruments…The defence of mechanical arts from the charge
of being undignified, the renewed emphasis on the coincidence of the horizons
of culture and that of the liberal arts, on one side, and practical work and
servile work , on the other, implied in reality the abandonment of a millenary
image of science, they implied the end of
an essential distinction between knowing
and doing. (My translation and
emphases.)